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Germany's Gaullist Foreign Policy

By

Jeffrey Gedmin

Updated April 17, 2003 12:01 a.m. ET

BERLIN -- "There were no dead bodies lying on the ground nearby when we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall," says Wolfgang Thierse, president of the German parliament. Donald Rumsfeld was making "an absurd comparison" when he likened the fall of Baghdad to the collapse of the East German communist system, according to Heinrich August Winkler, a leading historian at Berlin's Humboldt University. A German television journalist told me recently that "CNN was just selecting handfuls in Iraq that were cheering -- this is not representative of the whole country."